26 August 2013

How Madeleine Messager Became Bibi Lartigue

This photograph was taken during the winter of 1930 and the place is Megeve in the French Alps. The woman who poses on the snowy slope is festively attired for a day of skiing but the festivity does not reach her eyes. Her name is Madeleine Messager Lartigue; her nickname is Bibi, given to her by her husband. Can we ever see her for herself, once we know who her husband became ?

In Art
And Illusion, E.H. Gombrich wrote that artists paint what they know, rather
than what they see.It was the contention of the
Frenchman Jacques-Henri Lartigue, “I have always been a painter.”Yet I look at his paintings and his photographs and want to tell him, “ No,
you are a photographer.”In spite of
training at the renowned Academie Julian in Paris, in spite of numerous
exhibitions, Lartigue was never able to convince tout Paris that he was
meant to be a painter. In the event, Lartigue
(1894-1986) is remembered as one of the 20th century's preeminent
photographers.

When Madeleine
Messager married Jacques-Henri Lartigue on December 17, 1919, it seemed a perfect match.They were both young, beautiful, and full of
a joie de vivre that we associat, in retrospect, with the Jazz Age or, as the French call it, Les Annees Folles (The Crazy Years). In him, restless energy had
yet to find the right outlet.In her, it
was both more joyful and more serene.He
described herlater as being “wonderful,
joyful, intelligent, and curious ... " Perhaps
it was the difference in their backgrounds that gave her the stronger
anchor.Her father was Andre Messager, a respected orchestral
composer and the director of the Paris Opera. .
Lartigue was just the son of a wealthy family of industrialists. Their son Dani was born August 23, 1921, and a daughter Veronique was born in1924, but lived only a few months. (Photo - Bibi on their honeymoon at Chamonix, 1920).

An elegant couple, Jacques and Bibi participated in the bustle of the 1920s. We know that Lartigue was fascinated by creative couples from his
admiration for the film director Sacha Guitry and his wife, actress
Yvonne Printemps. From north to south, their destinations were
intended to spark Lartigue's paintings ( Etretat, Deauville, the Basque Coast,
Biarritz, Mont Blanc, the French Riviera) and it seems unkind to point out that the spark emanates from the adventurous Bibi.

From the time he was a boy, Lartigue took pictures constantly, documenting a life of fun, speed, and glamor, and
also creating a series of characters out of his female companions, most
memorably his first wifeInan inversion of the Gombrich maxim: he looked
at Madeleine Messager and saw Bibi Lartigue. And yet, after reading Kevin D. Moore's recent (2004) biography Jacques-Henri Lartigue: The Invention Of An Artist the reader
knows no more about Madeleine/Bibi than when they started, not even the dates when she
was born or when she died.

Aesthetically, Lartgue was caught between Scylla and Charybdis.If his painting had been morecompetent, a comparison to that of his friend
Kees van Dongen would not have been invidious.Ifhis sun-washed autochrome
photographs had been paintings, they would have looked too good to be true, lacking
the authority of reality behind them.

Yet he
seemed to live a charmed life, skating along its surfacelike a water beetle.If his circumstances during the 1930s were
shabby, he sought to downplay life inthe twenties.When they arrived a
Nice in May of 1920, they styaed first with relatives before taking up residence
at the Eden Roc.He didn't even know the
owner of Chateau de La Garoupe when he went to paint there, he knew one of the
gardeners.When they were at Cannes with
their friend Arlette Boucard, Lartigue emphasized that the spectacular house
belonged to Arlette's father, no man of leisure but the hard-working Dr.
Boucard, When the
Lartigue family fortune was severely diminished by the stock market crash of 1929, Lartigue refused to compromise his ideas or give up his liberty to earn a
living. (Photo - Bibi in their amilcar, 12 September 1927)

Around 1927 when Jacques gave up color for black and white photography, Bibi stopped smiling for the camera. Bibi appeared doubtful about their life together. Did she doubt his love or his talent as a painter? We know that she left him shortly after the vacation at Megeve and that they were divorced in 1931. We also know that he met the beautiful Romanian model Renee Perle in March of that year. For the man who loved women, after two years with Renee, there would be others - Marcelle, called Coco, and his third
wife Florette - none of them were the person that Bibi was. As for Madeleine Messager Lartigue, she made a life for herself away from the camera.

(Photo - Gerard Willemetz and Dani Lartigue at Royan, 1926)

For further reading: The Autochromes of Jacques-Henri Lartigue,
published in 1981 by the Viking Press, edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

All photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Ministere de la Culture, Paris.

Bibi Lartigue at the Eden Roc, Hotel Cap d'Antibes, Nice, 1920.

Bibi Lartigue in the Park at Chateau de la Garoupe, Cap d'Antibes, 1920.

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"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins